Hello there, Reality

Anger

"Maggie, how are you feeling today?" Dr. Candace quips. I intertwine my fingers around the loopholes of my belt.

"I've been better," I murmur, tears well up in my eyes. Dr. Candace was introduced to me after I was discovered by the rocks, all alone and sobbing. Snotty-faced and crestfallen, I'd tried to explain that the man whom I'd hoped would be by my side in the future was post-mortem and that I'd been shot. They asked where I'd been shot. I'd said I didn't know. My hands had searched the contours of my plain body for any sign of a gunshot wound and I found that I went unscathed. The shooter must've missed.

Freezing, I'd empathised that I needed to see my beloved before he was stashed into a suit, shaven clean and placed ten feet under the ground. The townsfolk that encircled me along with Jerry and the sheriff told me that they'd taken no body back to town for embalming. I'd been uncovered alone. I couldn't believe them. I saw my beloved's mother amongst the throng and cried out for her attention, my throat too dry to make any other sound but guttural. She'd told me that I was delusional and that she couldn't have children, because of her infertility following a motorcycle accident she'd had with her former partner. My retort was simple: my beloved was adopted, he'd told me so too.

I'd been taken back to the petite medical centre slap bang in between a gaming store and a colony of rows upon rows of houses. The physician had taken one glance at me and had me sporting a pair of fresh, clean clothes that someone had left behind and had been left to gather dust in a box in the physician's storeroom. She'd popped a thermometer in my mouth and after a few uncomfortable minutes of not knowing where to position my tongue around the thermometer, it was affirmed that I was suffering from a fever and that it was my illness making me speak rubbish, at least that was what was written into my file.

Unfortunately, for the congregation visiting me in my makeshift patient bed, my mind stayed set that my beloved had existed in this world and that someone had shot him and had aimed a bullet at me too. It was my mum's idea to pay a visit to the neighbouring town to have a chat with a professional neurologist who could perhaps formulate a reason as to why I was spouting a load of nonsense (at least those had been my mum's words) and that's how I met Dr. Candace, a psychiatrist who entertained the notion that the psychology of my mind and the neurology behind it were faulty. She'd scratched the idea of a head injury causing me to have known two personas that did not exist because the health professional that had taken a look at me on the day I was found by the rocks had made no report of a head injury and I'd never complained about a headache.

"How do you mean," she rests her clipboard on her crisscrossed knees and switches her biro into her writing hand,  "have you been touched by some of the resentment and mockery you face at school?"

The plastic of my cup sighs as I release my hold on it by placing it beside a jar brimming with sweets. Dr. Candace always knows how to bribe her patients to talk.

"No, that isn't an issue now that the principal spoke to my class teachers about leaving me be."

She smiles, "That's great of your principal, because I know that a few of the staff have been picking at you for your story."

I grimace at my lap, floral pink winks back up at me. Mum believes her favourite happy colours might bring me out of my stupor; she'd said she'd read an article on the relationship between colours and happiness and it had been a promising discovery that might "aid" my recovery.

"I'm just overwhelmed with anger. No one believes me. Everyone thinks I'm mad and I can't make them un-think I'm strange if I have to come visit you twice a month, no offence." My left knee jolts up and down during my rant, because I'm on edge. If I was to ever hear the murderer speak again, I would be able to identify him easily; the nightmare of the night my sweetheart died kept coming back to me. My own mind insisted I never forget the day that I lost what I treasured most and the only person I know who would've believed me in this circumstance had he not been the one taken away from me.

She gave her watch a wry glance over that told me she was disliked by a lot of her patients and was trying her best to hold back her temper with me. I sniffed, even the doctor of psychiatry thought I was just a bewildered child insisting on living a lie.

"You've treated many patients haven't you?" I demand. This is the final time I'm ever paying an hour with Dr. Candace from my mother's and father's wallet (it is harder than you think to get employed when the whole town believe I'm unstable and irrational), so I better make the most of my time left. Twenty-three minutes should be enough to make someone understand, and even though I mirthfully know it isn't, Dr. Candace is the only one who should be on my side.

"Yes, I have. Many, yes," she responds, an uncanny expression on her soft face, "why do you ask?"

Infuriatingly, the doc of psychiatry is my last hope, and so I have to restrain my character to prevent myself from being put up on the unstable registrar (even if most treat me as if I was already on it), "In all the years you've been working as a psychiatrist, have you ever come across a situation like this: where the patient is telling you a tale that everyone thinks they've spun, even though they're adamant they've not made up a single moment of it."

She puts a lid on her biro, places her biro on her wooden desk and then places her notepad next to its esteemed colleague on the desk, "Yes, I have...however..."

"There'll have been someone like me eager to tell everyone the real truth that everyone else is hiding from for whatever reason. I just can't bottle it up anymore, I've wasted so much breath and effort on making people 'see' what they don't care to think about. Is it possible to meet a person in my shoes?"

She visibly slumps her shoulders and rolls her head back on her chair, "Yes, but there is patient confidentiality which forbids you meeting a patient like this. And bare in mind that this is a patient on the ward, who is more fragile than you."

I don't think she ever expected my next words or the conditions that followed, but she agreed to all of it. She knew it was the only considerable thing she could do for me.

"I would like to admit myself in as a patient of the psychiatric clinic. I think three months of our chats have given you enough diagnoses you can use to have me put on the ward as swiftly as possible. I do, however have a few conditions. I do not want my parents knowing that I admitted myself and for what reasons. Tell them that you'd come to the conclusion that the guidance and assistance the nurses and other doctors could give me would benefit my road to recovery or something along those lines, I don't want to have to worry about them worrying about me. Also, I don't want to be administered any pills during my stay on the ward, but otherwise all the staff should treat me as any of the other patients. I don't want to get into a kerfuffle with someone about my treatment, that's the last thing I want. And lastly, can I have the name of this patient who could possibly understand me?"

She sighs and clasps her hands together, almost as if praying for lunch hour to come knocking round the door before she has to answer to me, but after a long intake of breath she says, "Your request is understandable. You want to meet someone who knows what you're going through. I will, in this case, accept the terms and conditions, allowing you onto the ward, not only because I believe it will raise your spirit but also because you might uncover something useful whilst you are there. However, I expect you to tell no one about why you were admitted. I'll let the staff know about the pills, but remember, try to do all of the activities they offer on the clinic, so as to avoid raising suspicion amongst your fellow companions."

She stands up, dusting off her pants with her hands and nods at the sweets if I want one. I politely shake my head and put on my glamoured up biker's jacket (dad's way of apologising for not being able to pick me up from the clinic meaning that I have a forty minute walk to home if I go by foot or a twenty minute bus trip).

"I'll let you know the date of your admittance and about the name of the patient, I'm afraid you'll have to discover that for yourself because I'm law-abided not to tell you. I don't think it'll be as tricky to find out as these past few months have been for you though.